... Melkor knowing that his devices had been revealed, hid himself and passed from
place to place as a cloud in the hills:...then it seemed to the people of Valinor
that the Light of the Trees was dimmed and the shadows of all standing things grew
longer and darker in that time…

(S.p.83)

¶1 The poet Keith Douglas who survived El Alamein to be killed in the Normandy landings
of 1944 said: Simplify me when I am dead. Tolkien would have asked for this in vain;
though had he done so I believe my topic would in some form or other be regarded
as one of the essential themes of his work.

But first of all to the Here and Now. I would like to thank the Society for
its generous hospitality, and I am most grateful to Chris Crawshaw for keeping me
informed about the details of this occasion. I know I speak for all the family when
I say it is an honour to address an organisation whose contagious enthusiasm promotes
diverse and informed interest in T.'s work. But this makes me even more aware that
I have no special authority to comment on a momentous academic and literary achievement.

I. Glimpses of Perfection

¶2 In Smith of Wootton Major Nokes says to Prentice over the matter of the Great
Cake's theme:' It's my place to have ideas...'(p.8) And in Leaf by Niggle, after
N.'s departure Councillor Tompkins declares about art that there is 'scope for bold
young men not afraid of new ideas and new methods.'(p.77)

¶3 But it is not in the spirit of Nokes's arrogance that I have chosen to speak
to you about ideas in Tolkien's work rather than about the author as a person I knew
and loved. As for Tompkins's comment: I am not young or bold, and if I am lucky I'll
put some new life into old ideas by using well-tried methods.

¶4 Like Smith, under the influence of a star inherited by chance from a grandfather,
I hope I can do some justice to an elvish heritage by considering it in a way I imagine
Tolkien would have approved of and as an indirect tribute to his son Christopher's
scholarly work in providing us with a coherent and comprehensive history and text
of its making.

¶5 Passing through the perplexing and often fearful realms of Faërie, Smith chanced
on the Vale of Evermorn, where the senses become so fine-tuned that the intricacies
and textures of the natural world are experienced with a new intensity, and the sight
and sound of the dancers, their ART, are of a piece with it. Somehow there is a feeling
that he has found his heart's desire, and could rest here were he not a mere mortal.(p.23).

¶6 When Niggle moves on from his cooperation with Parish in what we might call
the post-purgatorial 'Other Side', Parish sees that they are in the picture that
he had despised Niggle for applying himself to.

(pp 74-5) This suggests that our imagination, particularly when channeled into ART,
harks back and forward to a kind of perfection or to a stage on the way from or to
it. When he protests that the picture in Niggle's shed did not seem 'real', he is
told that it was only a glimpse then but 'you might have caught the glimpse, if you
had ever thought it worth while to try.'

¶7 It struck me that such moments reflect on how we all glimpse, indistinctly
and without warning, our own equivalents of Evermorn and Niggle's Tree and Vista
as we journey through a world full of anxiety and confusion, but also that the sense
of exile from and yearning for an indefinable wholeness pervades and often gives
coherence to T.'s narratives. Though I shall focus mainly on the impact of settings
and the natural world, I don't believe such intuitions are confined to these. The
intense description of Aragorn's first encounter with Arwen in Theoden's hall is
one of many heart-stopping personal encounters in which the emotion is imagised as
a recognition of something unimpaired and utterly true to itself.( L/R, p.537)

¶8 In a letter to Christopher Tolkien ( January, 1945. L.pp 109-10) T. says that
many Christians, including himself, ' have tucked The Book of Genesis (by which he
means the story of creation, earthly paradise and fall) into a lumber room of their
mind as not very fashionable furniture...and have forgotten its beauty...even as
a story.' But he also says: '...partly as a development of my own thought on my lines
and work (technical and literary)...I do not now feel either ashamed or dubious on
the Eden myth...There was an Eden on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it
and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted,
its gentlest and most humane is still soaked with the sense of 'exile''.

¶9 He tells Christopher who was training to be a pilot in S.Africa that even his
persistent memory of home reflects this thrist for Eden: '...an illusion of the stay
of time and decay and a sense of gentle peace.' He contends that however much we
long for this we cannot recover it, any more than the town-dweller who loves the
countryside more deeply than those who work in it, can become a 'real landsman',
though he is paradoxically both more so and less so, less truly earthy. In just the
same way the Hobbits hanker for the Shire as it was, and even Gandalf longs for the
Elder Days. Neither is recoverable.

¶10 As for The Fall, T. says that ' subject to the permission of God' we are all

' free not to rise again but to go to perdition and carry out the fall to its bitter
bottom...And at certain periods...that seems not only ...likely ...but imminent.'
Only those who do not so descend '...have...never finally bowed heart and will to
the world or evil spirit.' For T. in 1945 this meant a cocktail of mechanism, scientific
materialism, & totalitarianism.

II. Tolkien's religious convictions

¶11 The equivalents, I don't say conscious parallels, of such perversions of order
and abuses of power are the dark consequences of various falls from grace in T.'s
sagas. And the longings and glimpses that I have mentioned follow the ensuing darkness.
Not surprisingly T. declared that 'there cannot be any story without a fall, at
least for human minds as we know them and have them; all stories are ultimately about
the fall.'(L. adapted. p.147) And what he says about the Fall is not 1940s political
pessimism coloured by religious language. Unlike a fine essay in Mallorn 25 about
T.'s concepts of death and immortality, a recent TV documentary made no explicit
comment on the Christian convictions or Catholic faith that lie behind such personal
and critical utterances. So I feel it would be useful to outline some comments from
his letters on matters of Faith since they underlie what I shall say about Eden,
Fall and Exile in Tolkien.

¶12 He said (L pp172ff) that because his work is fundamentally religious he has
largely avoided detailing cults and practices in his imaginary world. The religion
is absorbed into the story and symbolism. The character of Galadriel is one instance.
It is inspired partly by Catholic theology about Mary as indeed is the imagery of
the Queen of Faërie in SWM( p.27) She is 'a pentitent ( who) in her youth (was) a
leader in the rebellion against the Valar ( the angelic guardians). At the end of
the First Age she proudly refused forgiveness or permission to return. She was pardoned
because of her resistance to the final and overwhelming temptation to take the ring
for herself.'(L. p.407) He also wrote ( L.p.255) that his convictions meant that
he did not expect 'history' to be anything other than a 'long defeat' though it contains
in his own legendary version ' some samples and glimpses of final victory.' The delight
he took in the living world, reflected in those moments I refer to in the short tales,
he was careful to qualify by saying that those like himself ' who believe in a personal
God, a Creator, do not think the Universe is in itself worshipful, though devoted
study of it may be one of the ways of honouring HIM...'(L. to Camilla Unwin, p.400)
A stance subtly presented through the uncorrupted elves for whom the natural world
is the source and inspiration for living art. Perhaps Tolk-inspired 'naturists' and
advocates of L/Rs as the epic of the Green Movement should take account of this.

¶13 But T.'s stories also reflect his own perplexed position as one of the faithful
in age of scepticism and international upheaval. In a letter to my father (L.p.393)
he stressed what it was like to be born in the late 19th century and to live on into
the 1960s:'...our senses or imagination of security have been progressively stripped
away from us. Now we find ourselves nakedly confronting the will of God as concerns
ourselves and our position in Time.' To indicate how he wrestled with the challenge
he cites Gandalf's words to Frodo early in the L/Rs and later to those who are dithering
with ideas in face of a remorseless enemy (In those chapters entitled 'The Pyre of
Denethor' & 'The King of the Golden Hall'):

1.)You have been chosen and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits
as you have...2.) it is not our part to master all the tides of the world but to
do what is in us for the success of those years wherein we are set. Injunctions that
underline the radical, modestly Christian contention at the heart of all T.'s fiction:
the power for good of apparently insignificant forces.

¶14 Tolkien's fondness for and serious response to the early chapters of Genesis
are only fully comprehensible in the light of this awareness of a divine purpose
in Creation, human imperfection in the context of a conflict between Good and Evil,
and above all, potential redemption.

III. AINULINDALÉ & Quenta Silmarillion

¶15 T.'s creation and fall legends are not centred on humankind

(L. p147) They narrate elvish concepts of perfection, damnation and tragically heroic
pride. But Men and Women(and other races) are subtly involved. Their appearance coincides
with the creation of the derived lights of Sun and Moon and their association even
with the dark elves (or Moriquendi) refines their response to the riches and resources
of Arda. Their first days are described in Eden-like terms: their joy was the joy
of the morning before the dew is dry, when every leaf is green. But the dawn is brief
and the day full often belies its promise.( QS Ch.12,p.123)

¶16 In the terrible wars that follow many of their races fall 'under the domination
of the Enemy' {Melkor or Morgoth and his network} (L.p148) But later in the Silm.(
pp 168-9) we hear of how Felagund of the House of Finarfin (one of the Calaquendi
who have dwelt in the Light of Aman) encounters the tribe of Bëor, ancestor of, among
other figures, Eärendil, Elrond, and indeed Beren for whom Felagund sacrifices himself
in a fatal struggle with Sauron's werewolf.

(S.pp208-9)

¶17 This chance encounter is highly significant since his harping and song enchant
them with the elvish creation legend. His harmonies reflect the themes of Ilúvatar's
music of creation; and at first because they seem to have been journeying west towards
a rumour of redemptive light out of a terrible darkness, they think that this elven
king is one of the Valar, or guardian creative powers. They call him Nóm (or Wisdom)
suggesting that they do not distinguish Art, Thought and its Maker. And at this moment
it is perfectly consistent with T.'s beliefs and imagery to bear in mind the profound
interreaction between Word, Light and Darkness in the first chapter of John's Gospel.
Like the last prophet, John the Baptist, to whom John the Evangelist refers, Felagund
was ' not the Light.' But he was ‘to speak for the Light.'(JBPh. transln.) Crucially,
though, there is a sense of lost wholeness, which the art of the elves makes coherent
to men after they have somehow turned away from an inexplicable corruption. Smith's
journey into Faërie and his subsequent 'great weariness and bereavement' (SWM, p.37)
as well as Niggle's yearning to interpret creation, are variations on this theme.

¶18 Which cannot be fully understood without reference to the Ainulindalë ( the
'fashioning and forming' music of the Ainur or holy ones, the valar and maiar whose
task it is to order the world) As they arrange and adorn it, the analogy with Eden
is more than implicit:' the Valar walked the earth...clad in the raiment of the World...the
earth was becoming as a garden for their delight, for its turmoils were subdued...'
( S.p.23) The description of the Isle of Almaren, first home of the Valar in Arda,
is a joyous unfolding of growth: 'when all things were young and new-made green was
yet a marvel in the eyes of the makers; and they were long content...'(S.p.40)

¶19 This joy in devising and making is distinctly elvish: spontaneous but with no
notion of the superiority of the untamed wild or unregenerate primitivism. In T.'s
creation legends the WORLD is the wonder and gives substance to the music of Ilúvatar's
themes: earthbound creatures are not overawed by unearthly realms or divine visitors
(as in Greek legends). The earth's revelations amaze the ruling and fashioning powers.
They also know it is a place that will only be complete with the coming of Elves
and Men; and it is for this reason that they later desist from ruining it by titanic
war with the Enemy.

¶20 As with the subsequent Darkening of Valinor, it is during the innocence of festivity
and celebration that Melkor strikes, filled with hate at the beauty of the Earth
in its Spring. He destroys the northern and southern lamps, Illuin and Ormal that
lit a changeless day (S.p. 40), the only steadfast light ever to bless the world.
His northern kingdom spreads pestilence and fear into the unfolding plenty and harmony
of Almaren.

¶21 The grotesque mechanism of Melkor's ruinous impact is later felt at close hand
when Beren and Lúthien approach Angband: Black chasms opened beside the road, whence
forms as of writhing serpents issued. On either hand cliffs stood as embattled walls,
and upon them sat carrion fowl crying with fell voices (S.p.215) Names, too, change
in meaning and tone to signify how Evil mars the earth. After the Dagor Bragollach,
The Battle of Sudden Flame, and the fall of Fingolfin (QS,Ch.18) the plane of Ard-Galen,
the Green Region becomes Anfauglith, the Gasping Dust, barren and lifeless. Likewise
the river island of Tol Sirion or Minas Tirith, Finrod Felagund's Tower of Watch,
is invested with evil by Sauron and renamed Tol-in-Gauroth, Island of Werewolves
(S.p.187)

¶22 After their enforced departure from Middle Earth to Aman, the westernmost land,
the Valar construct behind the walls of the mountainous Pelóri ('defensive heights')
a second but fortified Eden or Paradise in Valinor. And it seems that in all future
ages of Elves and Men the remnants of bliss, completeness and order can only survive,
and never impregnably, in some kind of fastness, which in itself may delude or fossilise
its makers. Many examples spring to mind; and it is clear how this helps to determine
the narrative structure of the stories and the glimmers of perfection that occur
in those places. Three contrasing instances alone indicate the breadth of T.'s vision.

¶23 1.) Long after the departure of the Noldor from Aman, Turgon the Wise, second
son of Fingolfin plans to build in the secret realm of Gondolin a city like Tirion
the Fair where elves dwelt in Aman, but he is warned by Ulmo, the Vala who is Lord
of the Waters: love not too well the work of thy hands and the devices of thy heart
(S.p.150) And who can forget the tragic voyage of the Gondolindrim to seek pardon
and aid from Valinor when Turgon loses his nerve over the encroachments of Angband,
yet still will not reveal his secret (S. p.192)? Or the ulitmate fate of Gondolin(
S.p.292) decided once more at a moment where vigilance gives way to a celebration
of the earth's live-giving properties ? The host of Morgoth came...at night upon
a time of festival when all...were upon the walls to await the rising sun, and sing
their songs at its uplifting; for the morrow was the great feast that they named
The Gates of Summer. But the red light mounted the hills in the north and not in
the east...'

¶24 2.) Imladris or Rivendell is in marked contrast. Elrond as T. says (note
to L.p.153) stands for 'ancient wisdom...the preservation of all tradition concerning
the good, wise and beautiful.' And although it is a place to reflect on these matters,
and atmospherically reminiscent of a lost harmony 'it is... visited on the way to...deeds
and 'adventures', and 'it may be necessary to go from there in a totally unexpected
course. So necessarily in L/R (Frodo) having escaped to Elrond from the imminent
pursuit of present evil...departs in a wholly new direction: to go and face it at
its source. A sense of what has been lost may therefore generate new resolves rather
than retreat into an illusory stay of time.’

¶25 3.) Lothlórien( Blosson Dream Land) is another such haven. But the wise,
practical Treebeard (L/R pp488-90) suggests that the diminishing of its name from
Laurelindórenan, Gold-Song-Land-Valley, implies that it is now less close than it
was to the Ancient Light both in purpose and function. ' They are falling behind
the world in there...Neither this country nor anything else outside the Golden Wood
is what it was...' His own Song of the Seasons (L/R p.490) harks back to Arda before
the upheavals and yet takes us to a shrunken present

' when the years lie thicker than the leaves.' It is a mournfully energetic acceptance.

¶26 But it's revealing to move from the more familiar ground of the Third Age
to the second Eden of the Creative Powers. The Quenta Silmarillion( S.p.42) tells
us: In that guarded land the Valar gathered great store of light and all the fairest
things...saved from the ruin...naught faded or withered, neither was there any stain
upon flower or leaf in that land, nor any corruption or sickness in anything that
lived for the very stones and waters were hallowed... In contrast to the descriptions
of Almaren, albeit in the best sense, there is a more artificial, wistful ring to
this account. Yavanna Kementári ( Giver of fruits and Queen of the Earth) does not
entirely forsake the growing things of Middle Earth (S.p.46) but here in Valinor
she is more involved in thought and reflection about fruitfulness, and about its
likely abuse by those tainted with evil. And as Nienna, Lady of Pity and Mourning
waters the mould of the green mound Ezellohar(Corollairë) it feels almost like an
emblematic memory of the Isle of Almaren. Yet with song and tears they bring forth
on it the Two Trees of Valinor , Telperion ( Silpion/ Ninquelótë) and Laurelin (
Malinala/ Culúrien) We are told that about their fate all the tales of the Elder
Days are woven...Though the description of their unfolding and qualities is enchanting
(S.pp.43-4), their elaborate and complementary structure, colourings, and light-shedding
further imply the artificiality of this paradise. In a sense it contains both elvish
temptations and potentialities, and in that way has something in common with the
paradoxes of the biblical Eden.

¶27 There is a sense of measuring and preservation, too: the dews of Telperion
and the rain that fell from Laurelin Varda hoarded in great vats like shining lakes,
that were to all the land of the Valar as wells of water and of light. Thus began
the Days of the Bliss of Valinor; and thus began also the Count of Time...(S.p.44)
When involved in the exile from this we read that Turgon placed in the courts of
Gondolin images of the Trees of old, which he himself wrought with elven-craft...(S.p.151)

It reminds me of what the poet, W.B.Yeats says of his own temptation to have recourse
to art for art's sake:

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Graecian Goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling...

(Sailing to Byzantium)

Meanwhile the region of Nevrast from which Turgon had withdrawn was desolate, and
remained empty of living folk until the ruin of Beleriand. (S. p.151)

¶28 It must be stressed that the Trees of Valinor are not similar to or derived
from those of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and of Eternal Life in the Garden of
Eden. Whether or not these stand for the Omniscience and Immortality longed for by
and therefore tempting to beings confined by Time and Space, the Elvish temptations
(partly ours too, of course) are primarily a resistance to change and a desire to
combat immortality by a kind of fading into Twilight. A more potent parallel between
the biblical Eden and the Elvish one is the notion that God put Man there to 'dress
it and keep it', that is to care for and adorn Creation. And the only trees in Tolkien
that are really similar in complex implications to those of Valinor are The King's
Tree in SWM( p.20) and Niggle's Tree in its glorified mutations.(Passim in L/N)

¶29 In this respect it is worth drawing attention to a crucial and perhaps overlooked
or even misunderstood footnote to a letter where T. discusses the Trees of Valinor
in the context of the Elder Days ( in 1951 L.p.148): their light is, he says ' one
derived from light before ANY FALL, (it) is the light of ART undivorced from REASON,(it)
sees things both scientifically (or philosophically) AND imaginatively ( or subcreatively)
as beautiful. The light of Sun(or Moon) is derived from the Trees only after they
were sullied by evil. So then 'light of the Sun', the world under the sun, become
terms for a fallen world and a dislocated, imperfect vision.' So this Light, preserved
in things that grow and flourish, and yet are artifacts, represents precisely the
kind of wholeness of vision which is forever fractured and which T. believed that
we all long for. I have already said how men of the tribe of Bëor glimpsed it in
the song of Felagund. But for Elves and Mankind it will also become the light of
the enlightened stewardship of creation, which includes the exercise of power.

¶30 It follows that once what we might call disinterested creativity disappears,
when there is a division between what is useful or practical and what is beautiful,
pride and selfish manipulation are the inevitable consequences. This is why when
Smith is transformed by the Star he inherits a capacity to unite inventive design
with utility. (SWM,pp14-15)

¶31 Craft in his case is not the dubious word it becomes in considering the corrupted
artistic pride of Fëanor. At first this elven lord is well-motivated in preserving
the Creative Light in the silmarils but as soon as his work becomes a dimension of
personal power, an investment in his own standing, due in part to the cunning insinuations
of Melkor, the legend significantly hastens towards the destruction of the Trees
by the malice of Melkor and Ungoliant.

'... the Darkness that followed' was a kind of negative creativity.'...more than
a loss of Light. In that hour was made a Darkness that seemed not lack but a thing
with being of its own; for it was indeed made by malice out of Light, and it had
power to pierce the eye, and to enter heart and mind, and strangle the very will.'(
S.p.89)

Inevitable counterparts of this Darkness are the many instances of the assaults of
evil destroying the fruitfulness of the earth, or more surreptitiousy the attempt
of Sauron to seduce Elves and Men into making a false earthly paradise that has no
reference to the source of the Light in Valinor ( See L.p.152)

IV. Gandalf's Perspectives

¶32 After a long history of the abuse of CRAFT anticipated by this UNLIGHT, Gandalf
looks back as if in exile from the unsullied Light. It is during the journey from
Isengard ( L/R p.611) that he takes up one of the Palantír (literally: those which
watch from afar) It is the Orthanc Stone corrupted by Sauron into an instrument for
controlling the time-serving wizard, Saruman. Gandalf, his uncorrupted colleague,
longs to turn time back and see in it the city of Tirion the Fair and perceive the
unimaginable hand and mind of Fëanor at work while both The White Tree and The Golden
Tree were in flower.

¶33 It was Fëanor(S.p.64) who wrought these crystals...wherein things far away could
be seen small but clear and with the eye of the eagles of Manwë... But remember it
was also this elven lord who would not give of the light of his silmarils to Yavanna
to restore the Trees after their ruin, and it is one of T.'s masterstrokes of narrative
irony that at the very moment of his refusal, those jewels in which he has invested
too much of his pride are wrested from their iron chest in Formenos, before the gates
of which his father Finwë has been felled by Melkor. These jewels have a grim history
tied up with Fëanor's oath of vengeance, though one of them (of which we are reminded
in Smith Starbrow in SWM) is bound to the brow of Eärendil after his voyage of intercession
to Aman, immortalising him as a Star of Hope, which in turn illuminates the phial
of Galadriel( Lady of Light). Later, married to the indomitable spirit of Sam it
defeats the menace of Shelob, successor of Ungoliant (L/R,pp756-7): ' ...the glass
blazed suddenly like a white torch in his hand. It flamed like a star that leaping
from the firmament sears the dark air with intolerable light. No such terror out
of heaven had ever burned in Shelob's face before...'

¶34 From all of which it may be inferred that the redemtive qualities of the Light
are inextinguishable despite its abuse.( See L.p.149 & Foster CGME pp356-7)

¶35 Yavanna, though, had been generous, and made for the Vanyar and Noldor of Tirion
'a tree like to a lesser image of Telperion, save that it did not give light of its
own being...'( S.p.69) Its descendants have a complex history; a history of what
lives and is lovely, as opposed to that of the jewels which are fashioned and fatal.

¶36 One of those trees, Nimloth of Nümenor, stands in the way of Sauron's attempt
to subvert the kingship of Ar-Pharazôn and to return it to the allegiance of Darkness
(S.(Akallabêth)pp.326ff) for it was a memorial of the Eldar and of the Light of
Valinor. But another descendant is the seedling which Gandalf reveals to Aragorn
on the slopes of Mount Mindolluin. (L/R, [Ret/Kg.] pp.1007 ff.)

¶37 But before he does so, T. expresses the exile's longing for order and completeness
not as a fenced paradise but as a wide vista

(reminiscent of what enthralls Niggle in L/N ) In contrast to his longing to see
back with the Palantír, Gandalf now looks at the world with its intended and productive
beauty, which combines the works of our hands with the wonders of creation:

they saw the towers of the city far below them like white pencils touched
by the sunlight, and all the Vale of Anduin was like a garden, and The Mountains
of Shadow were veiled in a golden mist. Upon the one side their sight reached to
the grey Emyn Muil, and glint of Rauros was like a star twinkling far off; and upon
the other side they saw the River like a ribbon laid down to Pelargir, and beyond
that was a light on the hem of the sky that spoke of the Sea...

¶38Untold ages before, Melkor and Ungoliant had looked down from the summit of
Hyarmentir at theGuarded Realm. Below them lay the woods of Oromë, and westward
shimmered the fields and pastures of Yavanna, gold beneath the tall wheat of the
Gods...Melkor looked north and saw afar the shining plain, and the silver domes of
Valmar gleaming in the mingling of the lights of Telperion and Laurelin...(S.pp86-7)
A perspective which generates our longing to prevent the forthcoming ruin.

¶39 Above Minas Tirith Gandalf inverts, as it were, the image of Satan tempting
Christ by showing the rightful inheritor the kingdoms of the world. This is the realm
of a new order handed down by the Eldar kindred who will now fade and depart.

¶40 But Aragorn demands a sign that there will be more than this earthly inheritance
when he tells Gandalf that the Tree in the Court of the Fountain is still withered
and barren...

¶41 It is then that he is shown a sapling in an unlikely place, waste and frozen,
described in terms that remind us of Telperion of Valinor. Its miraculous survival
is a promise of restorative powers that may lie dormant just as the race of Eärendil
lay hidden in the wilds of the North. It is both a sign and a living assurance, but
it transmits something of that Light which stands for the uncorrupted vision needed
by artists and rulers alike. It signifies the renewal of order, and complements the
panorama we have seen by reminding us that the works of thinking creatures must cooperate
with the living earth, that power is a matter of responsibility. Long before this
moment Gandalf could have addressed Tree and King alike with words so tragically
misapplied to Macbeth by Duncan:

I have begun to plant thee and will labour

To make thee full of growing...

V. Beyond.

¶42 Tolkien's own narrative ironies are more to the point. When those of Fëanor's
house and kin whose pride burns less fiercely but nevertheless follow him out of
Valmar into Arda, they anticipate a feeling that runs throughout the tales and quests
of Middle Earth, an elegiac regret that will be felt by many again and again despite
the so-called 'eucatastrophe' represented in the words of Gandalf and Aragorn in
the Return of the King.In the Silmarillion these elvish wanderers often...looked
behind them to see their fair city, until the lamp of the Mindon Eldaliéva was lost
in the night. More than any others of the exiles they carried thence memories of
the bliss they had forsaken, and some even of the things they had made there they
took with them: a solace and a burden on the road.( S.p.100)

¶43 This is echoed in different circumstances by Smith when the Queen of Faërie
lays her hand upon his head:'...he seemed to be both in the World and in Faërie,
and also outside them and surveying them, so that he was at once in bereavement,
and in ownership, and in peace.' (SWM.p.28)

¶44 There is in the work of T. an unresolved tension between nostalgia and firmness
of purpose; and this is one of its appeals, echoing what he believed to be our ineradicable
yearning for a lost order, which could and should never be allowed to result in mournful
inertia. The road goes ever on for us all as it did gladly for Niggle. In terms of
what has been suggested that modest hero's prospects and attitudes, though expressed
with deceptive simplicity, distil some crucial thematic material.

'He was going to learn about sheep and the high pasturages, and look at a wider
sky, and walk ever further and further towards the Mountains, always uphill. Beyond
that I cannot guess what became of him. Even little Niggle in his old home could
glimpse the Mountains far away, and they got into the borders of his picture; but
what they are really like, and what lies beyond them only those can say who have
climbed them...(L/N.pp.75-6)

(Revised Sept.,1998 & Apr.,2011)

_______________________________________________________

ABBREVIATIONS and sources:-

CGME: The Complete Guide to Middle Earth: Foster (Unwin p/b,1978)

QS: The Quenta Silmarillion in distinction to other narratives that fall under the
general title of Silmarillion

L: The Letters of JRRT ed Carpenter with CJR Tolkien.(A&U)

L/N: Leaf by Niggle(Unwin p/b, 1983, incl. SWM)

L/R: The Lord of the Rings.(Page references are to the earlier composite editions.
Pagination has recently altered.)

1.) I would like to thank The Tolkien Society for its kind invitation and generous
hospitality on the occasion of its A.G.M. dinner in April, 1998.

2.) I would also like to thank Anna Mirosławska-Olszewska for her interesting correspondence
over several aspects of Tolkien’s work and views, and for inviting me to submit and
have published this lecture/essay in the University of Kracow’s Journal of Literary
Translation No.6 (1999-2000).

She kindly introduced my essay at the end of her own, which I have adapted slightly,
as follows:

‘ …(concerning) the notion of the ethical foundation of Tolkien’s world, references
to Christianity…tend not to be given enough emphasis in some critical works concerning
the texts and general response to them. Therefore the essay by Michael Tolkien which
follows is certainly a valuable contribution to Tolkien criticism. The author of
the article draws on many aspects of the world of Arda and links them up with other
works by Tolkien, Smith of Wootton Major and Leaf by Niggle. In this way he offers
new insights into the scope and intricacy of Tolkien’s vision, and helps to explain
the phenomenon of the author’s popularity throughout the world.’